De Blasio, With ‘Cultural Plan,’ Proposes Linking Money to Diversity

Image

Images from museums and others in the Cultural Institutions Group, which will continue receiving financial support under New York City’s first cultural plan for arts organizations across the five boroughs.CreditCreditThe New York Times

Unveiling the first “cultural plan” for New York’s five boroughs on Wednesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city will link future funding for museums and arts groups to the diversity of their employees and board members.

This unusual move by the city, which rarely dictates policy to its cultural leaders, puts pressure on the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall, the American Museum of Natural History and other pre-eminent institutions that are led largely by white male executives and power brokers from Wall Street, real estate and other industries.

Mr. de Blasio, who is seeking re-election this year with a message emphasizing inclusion and equity, said at a news conference in Queens that the city will collect data on the makeup of the staffs and boards and require these arts organizations to submit “meaningful goals” for making their ranks more diverse.

“This will be a factor in funding decisions by the city going forward,” Mr. de Blasio said. “We do this because we believe in fairness.”

Asked if he believed that certain cultural organizations were elitist, the mayor said, “I think they were.” He added, “There is still the assumption among many New Yorkers about where they belong and where they don’t belong.”

The proposal to tie money to diversity goals is a change from past statements by city officials. Tom Finkelpearl, the commissioner of cultural affairs, said in 2015 that the city had no plans to determine future financial support for arts groups based on their success in achieving diversity. “We’re not looking to be punitive,” he said then.

Asked to explain the city’s new, tougher stance on diversity, Mr. Finkelpearl said in an email on Wednesday: “Today’s announcement requiring diversity reporting from city-funded groups is the next step, building on everything we’ve learned to date to work toward a cultural sector that is fairer, more equitable and looks like the city it serves.”

Mr. de Blasio did not set any clear diversity targets for cultural institutions. Citing the statistic that about 26 percent of senior staff members at cultural organizations are people of color, Mr. de Blasio said: “We’ve got a long way to go. We’ve got more work to do.”

Arts groups are nevertheless likely to chafe at his budgetary conditions, particularly at a time when many depend on city dollars to help pay the bills.

The Met is close to a deal with the city under which the museum would accept a reduced annual allocation in exchange for the city’s approval of the Met’s plan to make up that revenue by charging $25 admission for visitors from outside New York State, according to a cultural executive in New York museum circles with knowledge of the negotiations, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized by the Met or the city to comment. (A Met spokesman would say only that the museum was still in discussions with the city about the proposed admission fee.)

Moreover, Mr. de Blasio is suddenly brandishing a stick after years of rarely visiting or championing cultural institutions, in contrast with his predecessor, Michael R. Bloomberg. When asked directly at Wednesday’s news conference whether he’d ever been to MoMA/P.S. 1, a nearby museum, Mr. de Blasio answered simply, “No.”

Several board leaders of major museums did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Yet some city officials were quick to go on the offensive against any potential opposition.

“There are people who will resist, who will resent, who will obstruct,” said Melissa Mark-Viverito, the City Council speaker. “Any moment for equality and inclusion doesn’t come easily.”

For now, the plan calls for maintaining city funding for New York’s most popular museums, allaying concerns that some of their subsidies would be redirected to smaller arts organizations. Mr. de Blasio pledged on Wednesday to increase money for the less prominent groups, many in neighborhoods outside Manhattan.

Mr. Finkelpearl acknowledged in an interview that the cultural plan was a road map rather than a guarantee of future changes to city arts funding. “This is not a budget document,” he said. “This is a document that sets a course. All this stuff will be taken into consideration in future-year budgets.”

At the same time, Mr. Finkelpearl added, “I would consider it a failure if we don’t have a measurable increase in cultural resources in those parts of the city that aren’t being reached right now in five years.”

Cultural participation is 20 percent higher among New York City’s highest-income earners than its lowest earners, according to the plan. Seventy-five percent of New Yorkers say that they wish they could attend arts and cultural activities more often, and 72 percent say they would participate more in cultural activities if the events were closer to home.

The plan also describes geographical inequities.

“There’s a north-south division in Brooklyn and Staten Island, and a sense in Queens that the cultural resources cluster along the 7 train corridor,” the document says. “As it becomes more difficult for moderate- and low-income New Yorkers to live near the center, transportation and geographic divides come to the surface.”

City arts leaders have long questioned the city’s century-old formula for financing cultural institutions, which lacks clear criteria or consistency, having been determined case by case over the years. Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, which funded the research for the cultural plan, said the report represented a positive step, provided that it eventually leads to a different formula by which arts organizations are financed.

“We should be celebrating that Staten Island will get more money for the arts,” Mr. Walker said. “Some part of this is going to be disruptive. That is a good thing, if it produces a fairer system.”

In the city’s budget for fiscal year 2018 — which was finalized in June, before the completion of the cultural plan — arts funding increased by $18.5 million, to a total of $188.1 million. Mr. Finkelpearl said he would use some of that to start making changes.

Diversity was emphasized throughout the cultural plan. A study conducted by the Cultural Affairs Department last year found that 67 percent of city residents identify as members of minorities, yet only 38 percent of employees at cultural organizations belong to those groups.

“The least-white jobs are maintenance and security,” Mr. Finkelpearl said, “and the whitest are curators. That points to some problems.”

Katy Clark, the president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, one of the dozens of arts groups that receive city financing, said diversity had long been a high priority for her institution and added, “There isn’t a reason why we shouldn’t be doing better.”

“I actually welcome the mandate,” she said. “You have to consider it in every hire. You have to work a little harder, but the talent is there.”

The report also calls for increasing funds for individual artists, citing research showing that 75 percent of New York City artists support themselves with outside income, and that 40 percent can’t afford supplies. New money and resources would also go to train more minority applicants for cultural jobs; improve interpretation services at arts organizations (about half of the city’s residents speak a language other than English at home); and improve access to cultural institutions for New Yorkers with disabilities.

The city also intends to create a position to help cultural organizations reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. “Twenty-five percent of this agency budget pays for energy,” Mr. Finkelpearl said, adding that environmental improvements to cultural buildings could result in substantial savings.

For the plan to prove meaningful, some say, a funding supply needs to continue.

“The report should be considered a clarion call to double down and reinvest in the arts and culture,” said Jimmy Van Bramer, majority leader of the City Council and chairman of its Cultural Affairs Committee, who helped spearhead legislation to create the plan.

The 33 museums and arts groups operating in city-owned buildings or on city-owned land — known as members of the Cultural Institutions Group, or CIGs — had worried that the city would take away some of their funding and give it to smaller organizations. The group’s members receive about 63 percent of the municipal arts budget; the remaining 37 percent is distributed through a competitive application process among nearly 1,000 organizations that are not in or on city property.

Money for the Cultural Institutions Group will not be cut, Mr. Finkelpearl said; in fact, the appropriation for some members will increase.

Image

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and its exhibitions, like this one featuring work by Irving Penn, will not face the financial cuts that some had feared it would in New York City’s cultural plan, which was unveiled on Wednesday by Mayor Bill de Blasio.CreditIrving Penn Foundation, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Alex Wroblewski for The New York Times

“There are CIGs that we fear are underfunded,” Mr. Finkelpearl said. “Some of those are in low-income communities, and that’s something we want to address in the plan.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Mayor Ties Arts Money to Diversity. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe